For all the power of the book’s data and charts the reader may remain unconvinced that inequality explains everything bad, and greater equality explains everything good, about happiness levels in different countries. Reducing inequality, nonetheless, seems like a good idea.

Seven Types of Atheism is an impressively erudite work, ranging from the Gnostics to Joseph Conrad, St Augustine to Bertrand Russell. In the end, it settles for a brand of atheism that finds enough mystery in the material world itself without needing to supplement it with a higher one.

That is one of several noble notions in this book. Everyone who still believes we can rescue the republic should embrace all of them. “Hope really is a choice,” says the author, “and a practical habit.”

Runciman’s flair for turning a pithy and pungent phrase is one of the things to admire about his writing. The cogency, subtlety and style with which he teases out the paradoxes and perils faced by democracy makes this one of the very best of the great crop of recent books on the subject.

This revelatory book, written with the journalist Anna Wharton, is a recording of Mitchell’s disappearance, as it happens. She is clear that the onset of the disease signals, for her, an existential rupture...one of the most valuable things about the book – a detailing of what the disease actually feels like, a demystification.

This book does the best job imaginable of putting you in the shoes of those who have faced that test, and by shining a light on this one aspect of our political life it succeeds in illuminating the whole.

In Morris’s partial defence, more scholarly critics have long taken Kuhn to task for seeming to be vague...But this book’s central and rather hysterically repeated accusation, that Kuhn thought reality didn’t exist and science was merely a social power game, is just plain wrong.

Collins is an unashamed liberal centrist for whom process is all. It’s the project of his book to argue that “disillusionment with conventional politics” is at best a callow, and at worst a dangerous, form of cynicism. Having recruited everyone from Pericles onwards for his debating team, he more than makes his case.

Holt, in a neat encapsulation of his project, elbows his way in and speculates on what they might have discussed. Even if the paces of a few decades (and too many I.Q. points to count) separate us from these giants, we’re lucky to have Jim Holt help us eavesdrop.

...the author’s hard-hitting, victim-centered report reveals the great strides being made toward achieving justice through collaborative and tech-innovative investigation. A hopeful report that is more triumph than trauma in the prosecution of sexual assault cases past and present.

Her story is too totalising, its passion can feel like a free-floating indignation, drawing anything and everything up into its complaint. The sections on Simone de Beauvoir and Elena Ferrante are better because they are more focused – although I began to feel that you could have too much...

But it is not likely to convert the committed partisans on either side, or in either party. Instead, it may well cause further entrenchment, with both sides burrowing deeper into their respective certainties.